Loud is the World
by Fairies Masquerade
Summary: "How could he love something so innately broken? No wonder demons flourished here. They had it easy." - TWD/Supernatural crossover for the USS Caryl's 'Mish-Mash' challenge.
1. The Roadhouse

_**A/N:** Hi. So, I'm expermenting again. Everyone feel free to blame The Readers Muse for this. It was her idea. This is a crossover between TWD & Supernatural, my submission to the USS Caryl's "Mish-Mash" challenge. I don't anticipate this being more than 3-4 chapters, tops._

_I should point out, this starts near the start of the 'Supernatural' series and will progress along as chapters go on._

_The opinions portrayed of all matters regarding God and religion in general are entirely my own. If you want to have a discourse on these matters with me, feel free to find me on tumblr or PM me here._

_My sincerest thanks to Muse for all of her encouragement and to Noxid Anamchara for her critique and fact-checking SPN knowledge with me._

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><p>For all the noise his brothers and sisters made, the fighting and the rage between them, Heaven had been fairly quiet. It was really the only thing he missed. Here, perched at the dingy bar in the crowded, smoky haze of Harvelle's Roadhouse, it had never seemed farther away.<p>

This is what he'd left for, given up his place in Heaven to come _here_, full of a yearning to understand these creatures his Father had made and a desire to escape the growing chaos that churned above. _'As you love me, love them more.'_ That was their commandment, passed down through the ranks, archangel to seraphim to cherubim, and once the great war was done and the dust settled, he'd simply accepted it and moved on. Guarding the path to Purgatory was no small feat, but as time marched on he found himself thinking more and more about why Father would ask _this_ of them. The few times he'd tried to bring it up with his brothers, he'd been derided, _mocked_, for daring to question an order. So he'd shut his mouth and kept his thoughts to himself until the idea, the passion for knowledge, consumed him. He'd left, slipping away quietly into the shadows without a word to anyone in his garrison and made his way here.

That no one had come after him was exhilarating and disheartening all at once.

He'd cloaked himself as best he could and set out to explore this great creation. He'd experienced the quiet grace of the sun rising in the morning, the clear call of birds in the trees and the cool, crisp rush of a flowing river. He'd learned that he liked to ride a motorcycle, the closest he could get to actually flying, and that even though he didn't need to eat or drink, he enjoyed the sweetly bitter taste of coffee. He'd seen the mark of Satan's hand all over this world, demons and monsters that he couldn't imagine God ever intended to exist, wreaking havoc on misguided souls. Most of all, he'd realized that human beings were selfish and self-destructive, flawed and violent. The decade he'd spent wandering the earth had given him little understanding of why he was supposed to love these _things_. How could he love something so innately _broken_?

No wonder demons flourished here. They had it _easy_.

He'd realized he'd made a mistake that was unfixable. He could never go home. He was stuck here, amongst these lost creatures.

So by day, he rode his motorcycle, streaking down long stretches of black pavement as far as the eye could see. At night, he drank. And he drank. And he drank, and with each sip of acrid booze that slipped past his lips, he felt himself becoming as lost as the mortals around him.

Tonight was no different. Sitting at the grimy bar with bad 70's country music caterwauling away in the background and nursing his second beer of the night as he listened to the chatter around him. Hunters, every one down to the last man, gathered within these walls to plan, reminisce, mourn and celebrate in one glorious hodgepodge of liquor and bad music from the clunky jukebox in the corner. Every night the ritual was repeated and every night, as he had for the past year, he sat at the bar and watched. Nobody bothered him here. With his knife and crossbow, his weathered leather jacket and the sour air that permeated from him, they simply assumed he was one of them.

"Fuckin' morons," he muttered into his glass.

"Me or somebody else?"

He jerked his head to see a woman had taken the empty stool next to him. A tiny, slender thing with a head of short cropped silver hair and eyes the clear light blue of a robin's egg.

"'M sorry," he said. "Didn't realize there was anybody close enough to hear me."

"It's all right." She carried with her the aura of grief and weariness that all hunters had, thick like a blanket wrapped around their shoulders, except hers didn't fit her right. It was too… fresh. Her shoulders hadn't bowed under the weight of it yet. _Damn. She's new._

"Buy you a drink?" He surprised himself with the offer that tumbled from his lips. He rarely spoke to anyone during his nightly sojourns to this podunk little bar unless he was ordering another beer, and asking anyone to join him in his melancholy had never happened. Yet here he was, offering to buy a woman he'd known all of five seconds a drink, with all the subtext that went along with doing so. The lady in question was eyeing him with a delicately arched eyebrow.

"OK."

He supposed stranger things had happened. He just couldn't remember any at the moment. A raised finger had a stein of beer appear in front of her almost like magic, with a fresh glass for him at it's side. They both sipped at the amber liquid, the silence between them as awkward as a whore in church.

A burst of laughter from the far side of the room, sharp and flat with it's jaded irony, pulled their attention. They watched the drunken hunters boast and brag over the pool table with forced bravado. Farther in the shadows a cluster of men gathered around a round table covered in charts and maps. A somber trio, two men and a woman, perched at the other end of the bar, the woman dissolved in tears on the older man's shoulder while the younger drove his knife into the scarred bartop over and over again. In between all of them flitted the blonde curls of the younger Harvelle, busing tables and refilling drinks where she could.

"Is it always like this?" His companion said softly. "So…"

_Grim? Gruesome? Depressing? Lonely?_

"Yes."

She shuddered and pulled her cardigan, made from some loose knit knobbly fabric, tighter around her shoulders. She seemed fragile to him, too delicate for this place.

"You won't last a week," he said shortly. "Should give it up, go home." To his great surprise, she laughed into her beer, turning back to him with a sad smile.

"You think I'm a hunter?"

_Well, when she put it **that** way..._

"No," he said. _Definitely not._ She was still chuckling, taking a long swallow of ale and daintily wiping her mouth before she answered him.

"I'm not a hunter. I'm just a friend of Ellen's."

"I see." That was smart of her. Too many people tried to hunt, filled with the burning righteousness of revenge-fueled fire, and were lost almost instantly. _Fools. All of them. _But she still had that look of one who'd lost someone, maybe multiple someones, to something dark. "Why not?"

She sighed and bit her lip. He could almost hear the wheels turning in her head as she thought.

"My mother, she taught me that everything happens for a reason. That there was a divine power… God… directing all of us along our own paths. That if we had faith in Him and recognized His hand in all things, we'd end up right where we were supposed to."

_God. If she only knew. _He almost wanted to laugh at her.

"You really believe that?"

"No." She took a long swallow of her beer, her fingertips idly tracing patterns in the rivers of condensation on the glass. "After my daughter…"

_Oh._ His stomach clenched at the thought. _What do you call someone who's lost a child?_ It took him a long moment to realize she was still speaking.

"I realized that everything just… _happens_. Everything happens. _Everything_ happens, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something."

"So you don't believe in God?"

"No, I do."

"Ah, so you're one of _those_." He tried to wash down the bitterness inside of him with a swig of his beer. "Believin' there has to be somethin' good to balance out all the evil?"

She turned and gave him a long look, her eyes taking him in from the soles of his scuffed boots to the tip of his head, covered in long hanks of hair that hadn't seen a good wash in days. He wondered what she thought of him.

"It's about balance, but it's more than that. I believe… I believe that to have faith in God is to have faith in _ourselves_. God doesn't want to control us. He wants us to _live_. That to recognize that everything we're capable of... the good, the bad and everything in between… to look at ourselves and _choose_ how we react to life, who we want to be and what we do here…" She laughed, her cheeks glowing pink in the faint light. "I'm not making any sense."

He can see it. For one brilliant, dizzying moment, he can see it and marvel in the simplicity of the idea. In all the millennia he could remember, he'd only ever made one decision on his own. It was one he regretted, yes, but it was still _his_. Just as she had clearly chosen _not_ to take up hunting to avenge the loss of her daughter, but had instead decided to _live_, in her memory.

_It's all a matter of choice._

"Yeah, you are."

Her eyes flick up to his and he's startled again at how clear and bright her eyes are. He'd read once an overly romanticised idea that eyes were window's to the soul. For the first time, he thinks he might understand what it means.

"Carol!"

They both turn at the call, seeing Ellen waving at her from the back door.

"That's me." His companion, _Carol_, rises to her feet, graceful despite the slight tremor in her hands and the blush that still tints her face. "Thank you for the drink…?"

He realized she was hoping he'd give her his name. He decided to give her the only one he really could.

"Daryl."


	2. Ellen

_**A/N:** This is a much shorter chapter than I had originally intended. Mostly because I lost what I had written previously in what I'm calling the Great MacBook Crash of 2014. So, sorry folks. But at least here is something so I can move on with this one._

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><p>Daryl lit a cigarette, enjoy the fleeting tingle of the nicotine hitting his system as he leaned against the Triumph. <em>His<em> Triumph, he supposed. It had certainly been long enough. The roadhouse was full to bursting, the sounds of music, hoots and hollers tumbling out the cracked windows and the half open door. From the sound of things, he figured there was a celebration happening inside; a hunt gone well. _That's somethin'_. Normally at this point he'd have gone inside, settled at his usual place at the bar and ordered his usual beer. Tonight felt... different. There was something in the air he couldn't name, something that had been haunting him all day. The shimmer of a feeling, just enough to set him on edge. So he sat outside, resisting the urge to go in and fumbling with the tarnished catch of his lighter.

"Daryl."

He sighed as Ellen Harvelle strode towards him with a determined look on her face. He liked Ellen well enough. She was steely eyed in her determination to give her daughter a home and stay strong in this world. She had a keen eye and a good habit of keeping her ear to the ground. It was something he could appreciate.

For all Ellen's savvy, he wondered if she had any idea he wasn't human.

He knew what she saw: the human shell he wore, with it's long hair and lined face, draped in worn cloth and smooth leather. Hunters traveled in the world of myths and legends, whispers and rumors and here he stood, a mystery among mysteries. He knew Ellen would serve him a drink every night without question. That didn't mean she trusted him.

"So I hear my friend got our solemn loner to talk," Ellen said with a smirk. _Oh._ It made his insides squirm.

If he was being honest with himself, it wasn't just tonight that felt different. All day he'd been thinking about the striking woman from last night, with her frail physique and her endearing insights on life. _Carol._ He didn't understand why he couldn't just banish her from his thoughts.

"Carol's different," Ellen said shortly. He smirked and took a quick drag off his neglected cigarette.

"Yeah, I got that last night."

"_No._ You don't. So _listen up_."

Daryl blinked, startled at the hint of aggression he picked up in Ellen's voice.

"'M listenin'."

"Carol is my friend," Ellen said as she folded her arms over her chest. "Been my friend since we were girls. She's a good soul."

The phrase gave him pause. _A good soul._ He'd been on this world a long time and he knew the truth, that true good souls were rare among these strange creatures. He'd seen too many people to count pretend, perform acts of kindness and charity but always with a selfish twist at their core, trying to put forward goodness only to impress others.

"What happened to her?"

"Same thing that happened to the rest of us," Ellen said with a shrug. "A demon. Her little girl started actin' funny and strange things started happenin' around the house. By the time I heard what was goin' on it was too late. Showed up at Carol's house and Sophia was just… gone and there was this thing wearin' her skin. We tried an exorcism, but…"

"_But_," Daryl murmured. He threw down the stub of his cigarette and ground it into the dirt with the toe of his boot. "How old was she?"

"Twelve."

"Bastards." The curse slipped from his lips before he could think. _It shouldn't have happened_. Demons were an aberration, something that should never have existed in the first place. They crawled over this world like locusts, devouring everything good and decent in their path, and they'd been created by his brother. He burned with the shame of it, ducking his head and tangling his fingers in the long hank of hair at the back of his neck.

_It's all a matter of choice._

Choice was dangerous. That much had been drilled into him for a long as he could remember. It brought confusion where there had been order and discipline. He'd seen it firsthand and he knew what choice could do. Lucifer had started the war with his choices and look at everything that had happened since. Look at humanity, with all the free agency they'd been granted. How they had mistreated that freedom. Even _God_, with all his might and power, had chosen poorly with his creation of the Leviathans. And yet...

The power to choose was the power to _change everything_.

Daryl felt his nerves tingle with with the same frisson he'd felt in the air all day and night, that sense of _something_, and suddenly it had a name.

It felt like _anticipation._

"It's just been six weeks," Ellen said._ Shit, Ellen._ He'd actually forgotten she was there for a moment. She was scrutinizing him with narrowed eyes. He heard her message loud and clear in the way she stood, by the gleam in her eye and the clench of her jaw. _Hurt my friend and see what happens to you._

"It was just a conversation," Daryl drawled slowly. _Of course it was._ He blinked and flinched at the smirk that broke out without warning on Ellen's face.

"We'll see." She spun on her heel and strolled back to the bar without a second glance at him.

He needed another cigarette.


End file.
